At Amazon, the Bathroom is an Extension of the Office (2015) | Hacker News Reader

At Amazon, the Bathroom is an Extension of the Office (2015)

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53 pointsdgelks35 comments

For what it's worth, I was there for nearly 3 years (including when this article was written) and never saw that kind of bathroom behaviour. People seemed to follow the general unwritten rules. Conversations were rare, and where they did happen, the usual idle chatter that happens anywhere, while at the sink or waiting for a toilet to be available.

I was there during one of the peaks in staff/toilet ratios. After getting rid of all of the 2 - 3 person offices and replacing it all with open plan office, and then packing us in even tighter (What they referred to as "high density" seating arrangements), actually getting to use a toilet was an extremely frustrating experience. With such a prominent gender bias, the male bathroom was constantly occupied, and a now infamous "toilet ticket" was cut (https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-employees-biggest-compl...).

Eventually they relented, and as new office floor space was opened up in new buildings, they agreed to reduce staff density and set a more practical staff:toilet ratio, along with adding in an additional toilet on every floor.

side note: What would have really helped was if staff weren't selfishly spending 5-10 minutes sitting on the toilet browsing the internet or playing games on their phones. It rarely takes that long to do the necessary.

> the male bathroom was constantly occupied

I'm always surprised by this. Why not have unisex bathrooms? In most companies, I have worked the bathrooms are just one toilet and sink. That way anyone can use it.

> What would have really helped was if staff weren't selfishly spending 5-10 minutes sitting on the toilet browsing the internet or playing games on their phones.

I can't agree with that. Without actually knowing for sure (I will guess that you weren't looking at other people while they poo), you are blaming employees for the lack of toilets. But in the rest of your description, it looks like it's clearly the company that failed to offer the most basic needs. Timing your team workers bathroom times doesn't look like a good approach to solve the problem.

> In most companies, I have worked the bathrooms are just one toilet and sink. That way anyone can use it.

it cost more this way?

All the companies I worked at in Chicago prime real state I can think of had gendered bathrooms, at least monthly. Common setup was 2 stalls 2 urinals and 2 sinks for the men (and I assume either 3 or 4 stalls for the ladies, depending on how tight they packed it).

My guess it would take the same space to make 2 single use bathrooms as a single bathroom with 2 stalls / 2 urinals / 2 sinks. The throughput of a 2 stall / 2 urinal bathroom for men would be about triple the single bathroom setup, depending on your exact pee to poop ratio.

And when you are counting dollars and cents, if a decision can save you from having another 600 square feet of bathroom space (at say $300 a squarefoot a year in lease), it can add up to some decent chunk of change (at perhaps the cost of some sanity).

By that rationale we should replace urinals with troughs & remove stall walls.

The model that makes the most sense to me is unisex small single rooms surrounding a set of sinks that can be shared. As long as you have kick plates on the doors you get similar size constraints, better privacy & queueing theory kicks in.

> Why not have unisex bathrooms?

Possible building codes. Or female employees that want their own restrooms.

This was the case a few years ago in an office I was helping network. Most of the people thought that unisex bathrooms would be a great idea, except the female employees that demanded their own bathroom space, away from men.

> I can't agree with that. Without actually knowing for sure (I will guess that you weren't looking at other people while they poo), you are blaming employees for the lack of toilets.

Smartphones aren't silent. They're often quiet, but in a bathroom you can easily hear when someone is tapping on the screen, or pressing buttons.

It's also pretty clear when someone is actually pooping or trying to poop. There are all sorts of small and/or loud sounds accompanying it.

Why not have unisex bathrooms?

Density of urinals vs cubicals obv.

> side note: What would have really helped was if staff weren't selfishly spending 5-10 minutes sitting on the toilet browsing the internet or playing games on their phones. It rarely takes that long to do the necessary

Most Americans don't eat nearly enough fibre so many people live in near constipation most of the time.

> What would have really helped was if staff weren't selfishly spending 5-10 minutes sitting on the toilet browsing the internet or playing games on their phones.

Consequence of open offices? People need their alone time, this one's Amazon's fault too.

Right, in the past if someone just needed 5 minutes to gather their thoughts they would nip out for a fag. Now noone does that anymore...

> nip out for a fag

A once common sentence which, after not hearing it for years, suddenly contains connotations of rasism and heterosexism.

I am not a native speaker. To me this sentence means just "to go outside for a cigarette break". What interpretation leads to racist/sexist undertones?

Well, if your mind is attuned to seek out offence at every opportunity, you might say that "nip" is short for Nipponese (like Brit is short for British Person) and "fag" is an old word for homosexual.

But of course "Nipponese out for a homosexual" makes no sense and no one would ever say that...

I am pretty sure that's just you, since the meaning is clear from the context. You should probably work on that.

Suddenly various AWS services start making sense,

- EBS : Elastic Bathroom Stalls

- ACL : Active Coding in Loo

- API Gateway : Always Poop Interactively ...

- IoT : Inconvenient Office Toilets

The article is full of instances like :

> The most horrifying moment of my employment at Amazon was the time I was using the toilet and a coworker began talking from the stall next to me. He asked me why I had not responded to his very pressing email [...] What email could be so important that it could not wait five minutes for me to use the bathroom?

> ... He began tapping on the wall between our stalls ...

> I regularly saw people bring their laptops into the bathroom, where they would sit on the toilet and write code

> I heard people take phone calls while mid-business

Why would anyone put up with that sort of madness? If my employer can't even let me shit in peace, I don't want to work for them. It's not like programming jobs are scarce...

Sounds like it was coworkers not the boss. And if you quit every job with an awful coworker, I am not sure you would have many jobs left ;)

Bosses tend to create (or encourage) this kind of behaviour. This is either an infrastructure or a management issue. If there aren't enough toilets, your infra sucks. If you need to discuss work while taking a dump, management sucks.

Sure, culture is part of this. But just an annoying guy talking to you in the crapper? Maybe can't blame that one...

So could my phone interview with Amazon have taken place while my interviewer was on the toilet?

Can’t speak for Amazon, but I did hear a SWE phone screen in progress in a Google bathroom once. When you gotta go, you gotta go.

One good norovirus outbreak would soon stop that behaviour.

My friends who works at Amazon a while back this is 2009 and between that and now they've been saying don't work for Amazon. I kept in touch with the freshmen and such since I was president of ACM.

It also affect my spending habit on Amazon too.

Jeff Bezos have been quoted Kindness is a choice but the things I've read especially the warehouse condition is right. Kindness is a choice and it seems like Amazon chose to not to be kind.

I'm glad they're trying to fix their culture but sheesh. The article mentioned about competitiveness. He makes it out as if it is some cut throat thing. If I have a family do I need more undue stress from competition while worry about my kids and family needs? I mean do I need to suck up and watch my back from co workers on top of everything? That's a terrible place to work for.

Even if it's not necessary so that I have cut throat coworkers, I still have to compete against them while doing my job. That's insane. At least with Government some branches such as FDA you get raises base on the papers you publishes IIRC, you don't need to hurt people or compete against your peers.

There was one company I worked at that, for whatever reason, people thought that the bathroom was a good place to have a phone call. Simple fix; when someone would start a phone call I would flush, and keep flushing every time they talked to make sure the person on the other end could hear it. I usually only took a few flushed for people to get the hint.

After nytimes articles, Amazon seriously has started improving its culture. Managers though still have same mindset of treating employees as replaceable resources. This is one instance after the article came out. My pregnant friend one day sent an email that she would be WFH as she isn't feeling well. Manager replied back that this is not acceptable and you should give a week of notice for your plans.

This might be okay in other fields, but in tech WFH is considered a perk and companies don't care as long as you do your work.

Look, if someone is pregnant and tells their boss they need to WFH, then they need to WFH. I cannot respect a company or a person that doesn't follow that simple rule. I know a couple of business owners in these parts that would have the manager sitting on the curb wondering how he got thrown out of the building so fast, and I'd applaud.

Minimum notices for WFH days baffles me.

I can understand making it a policy to limit WFH days to a very minimum, but the idea of a notice period for WFH makes no sense to me.

It makes people more unproductive then they really have to be.

I've made the choice to never work for a company that doesn't let me work from home whenever I want.

Managers though still have same mindset of treating employees as replaceable resources

It becomes self-fulfilling. Once you start having a high staff turnover then the org has no choice but to ensure that people are interchangeable and replaceable. Its hard to break out of that. Amazon's senior management should have nipped it in the bud early on.

It really varies by manager and org. I had one manager who would pull stuff like that. The other managers that I've had have been very flexible.

I agree that there have been institutional changes after the NYT article that have made the company more employee friendly.

I've been with Amazon for four years and have never once seen or heard of someone taking their laptop to the bathroom. I have difficulty believing that's true.

He's right about not enough bathrooms, though. It's really fucking annoying.

As a counterpoint, I worked there for 6 years until 2013, and I saw it happen a few times at the SLU campus.

Okay it's kind of silly to still conduct business in the restroom but why do people freak out when someone speaks in the restroom? Like, relax. Take it easy.

I'm curious to know what team/organization the OP was from. Because of how massive Amazon is, every team interacts with each other differently. For example, the org that houses Amazon Go is much more high stress, and I can imagine this happening there v/s a team working on building internal systems. I've been at Amazon for 5 years now, and have never experienced whatever the post said. I have, however, been in the uncomfortable situation where a colleague has tried to talk to me in the urinal about things outside of work.

Funny read though :)

I work for AWS since 2014 and I am in a building that arguably has highest density compared to other Amazon buildings. I have not seen a single instance of what the author describes, on tens of floors except that during peak times one may have to go to the next floor to find an empty stall. Specifically -- 1. I have not seen anyone take laptops to the stalls 2. No conversations in the bathroom, at most a Hi when washing your hands or a 'excuse me' at the door. Definitely no cross-talk across stalls. 3. No one is using bathrooms as a meeting place or a place for long conversations.

Since last year, there are also unisex bathrooms on each floor. While I am here, might as well dispel some other myths. Occasional WFH is the norm, not an exception. I haven't seen people work long hours as a norm. Most people come in between 9-10:30 and leave between 5-6:30pm. Some come in earlier and some later. Almost everyone I know is driven by their own passion for their work, customer obsession, immense learning opportunity, do things that have never been done before, increasing stock value and increase in their own market value, to name a few.

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